Ok, I confess. I have contributed to the $2.3 trillion that our country spends on health care every year. As a patient I want the best possible care for my family and me. As a physician I am the gatekeeper to expensive procedures, medications, and diagnostic tests. However, by several indices including life expectancy, infant mortality rate, and satisfaction with the health care system, we are not getting our money’s worth.

As discussed ad nauseum during the health reform debate, we can point the finger at any number of parties for the high cost of care: hospitals, the pharmaceutical industry, insurance companies, and patients. I would also add to that list health care providers.

Every physician that I know makes medical decisions with the patient’s best interest in mind. But conscious or not, there are competing influences. Patients may demand a particular medication they heard about from a friend or TV commercial. A drug representative may suggest the physician prescribe their drug over a cheaper medication that works just as well. A provider may order a few extra tests not because it is supported by evidence but out of fear of being sued. A procedure may be performed more often than medically indicated because it brings revenue to the practice.

The overwhelming direction is toward more care and higher costs. As much as 30% of all health care spending is estimated to go to unnecessary care. The other problem in this situation (and in a lot of others I can think of) is that more is not always better. In fact, more care can cause harm. The overuse of antibiotics have contributed to the rise in drug resistant bacteria that now make even simple infections harder to treat. The repetitive use of x-rays and CTs increase the risk of cancer particularly in children. Painful testing and potentially harmful procedures are often performed even when the results will not change the condition’s management.

So what should health care providers do differently?

The Archives of Internal Medicine recently published a study conducted by the National Physicians Alliance on the “Top 5″ things primary care physicians can do to improve the health of their patients by reducing health care costs. Through a series of discussions, groups of pediatricians, family physicians, and internists each developed a list of five evidence based recommendations that if followed would get more value out of health care dollars. This was followed by review and feedback from 255 physicians in these specialties.

Few of the recommendations are surprising and frankly most are considered standard of care practices. Throat infections should test positive for streptococcus prior to prescribing antibiotics. Doctors shouldn’t order annual EKGs or any other cardiac screening for low-risk patients who don’t have symptoms.

Hopefully, initiatives such as these will help physicians provide both better care and serve as better stewards of our nation’s health care dollars.

Top 5 Internal Medicine

Lower Back Pain: Don’t do imaging for lower back pain within the first 6 weeks unless red flags are present.

Lower Back Pain: Don’t do imaging for lower back pain within the first 6 weeks unless red flags are present.

Sinusitis: Don’t routinely prescribe antibiotics for acute mild to moderate sinusitis (inflammation of the sinuses) unless symptoms – which must include purulent (full of pus) nasal secretions AND maxillary (upper jaw bone) pain or facial or dental tenderness to percussion – last for 7 days OR symptoms worsen after initial clinical improvement.

EKGs: Don’t order annual EKGs or any other cardiac screening for low-risk patients without symptoms.

Pap smears: Don’t perform Pap tests on patients younger than 21 years or in women have had a hysterectomy for benign disease.

Bone scans: Don’t use DEXA (bone density) screening for osteoporosis in women under age 65 years or men under 70 years with no risk factors.

[In full disclosure, I serve on the Board of Directors of the National Physicians Alliance and am a member of the pediatrics working group for this study.]

2 Responses to “The Top 5: Better Care for Less Health Care $”

I heard on the news today that your organization want to give less antibiotics to save money………
My daughter went to her pediatrician in Jan. 2011 for a persistent cough. We were told it was a virus that would last a long time. She had strep throat without a sore throat that went untreated. It turned into Rheumatic Fever and Sydenham’s Chorea. She was on 40 days of antibiotics to clear it and now needs to be on Penicillin bid to protect her heart from damage. I have heard of a handful of cases in our area of Rheumatic Fever and I have only shared my daughter’s story with a few people so far. We live in the Midwest of the US. I think the campaigns to reduce the use of antibiotics directly contributed to my daughter’s health condition. She almost failed Kindergarten. She missed 32 days of school. She still has a rash. She has suffered from January until May and it still isn’t over. I would like to encourage parents, doctors etc for more strep tests. It is a sneaky bug and once it gets a hold of a person it is hard to clear it from the child or adult who is the unlucky person not to have gotten an antibiotic early on. I find it hard to believe that a physician who has their own child with a cough for two weeks wouldn’t do a strep test to at least rule it out. I wish I had known to ask for one. The doctor should have looked out for my child and asked for a strep test. This is not the only time I have taken my kids to doctors and were sent home only to return and needing an antibiotic. What doctor would allow their own child to go without a strep test?

I’m sorry to hear about your daughter, but I don’t really think that the NP Alliance guidelines have anything to do with her case. They don’t recommend against strep throat testing at all, or against the use of antibiotics for rheumatic fever, but for its unnecessary use in common cold and flu.

Also, the reasons to discourage doctors and individual people to not use antibiotics needlessly (again, like for common cold and flu) go well beyond saving costs (most antibiotics are dirt cheap, after all): the overuse of antibiotics brings out the forces of evolution on the bacteria in a person’s body, leading to teh emergence of antibiotic-resistant superbugs like MRSA and vancomycin-resistant staph, which then become hard to treat and put patients’ lives needlessly at risk — and then push docs to use stronger and more exotic antibiotics for even common infections, as those infections THEMSELVES become antibiotic-resistant. We need to break the chain, and that means not using antibiotics when they aren’t really necessary, as well as being sure to finish the round of *needed* antibiotics when you take them refusing to use household antibacterial soap, and eliminating the *routine* use of antibiotics in factory farms (that is, the use in most or all animals at the facility, instead of just for animals that are actually sick and need them).

I hope your daughter is feeling better, and getting caught up at school!